1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to computing devices and in particular devices that allow one application to be displayed at a time.
2. Description of the Related Art
Networked devices now encompass appliances, cars, consumer electronic devices and many other portable devices. These devices typically are limited in resources such as memory, computing power, etc. In one aspect, the display panels and scheme for presenting data on the display panels are limited as compared to a desktop environment. One particular area where this aspect is relevant concerns the telematics environment.
The electronic content and sophistication of automotive designs has grown markedly. Microprocessors are prevalent in a growing array of automotive entertainment safety and control functions. Consequently, this electronic content is playing an increasing role in the sales and revenues of the automakers. The features provided by the electronic content include audio systems, vehicle stability control, driver activated power train controls, adaptive cruise control, route mapping, collision warning systems, etc. The significant increase of the electronic content of land based vehicles has concomitantly occurred with the explosive growth of the Internet and the associated data driven applications supplied through mobile applications.
Telematics, a broad term that refers to vehicle-based communication systems and information services, promises to combine vehicle safety, entertainment and convenience features through wireless access to distributed networks, such as the Internet. Telematics offers the promise to move away from the hardware-centric model from audio and vehicle control systems that are built into devices that are custom designed for each vehicle, to infotainment delivered by plug-and-play hardware whose functionality can be upgraded through software loads or simple module replacement. Furthermore, new revenue streams will be opened up to automobile manufacturers and service providers through the products and services made available through telematics.
Since these infotainment systems integrate entertainment and information within a common envelope, the systems need to be highly integrated, open and configurable. However, the electronic systems currently on the market are custom designed for the make, model, year and world region in which the vehicle is sold. Additionally, the electronic systems being used today are linked by proprietary busses having severely limited bandwidth that are inadequate for data-intensive services combining information entertainment and safety. The presentation of data on these systems includes a simple display screen in communication with a computing device, where the computing device displays an application in the entire viewable area of the screen at a time.
Because of the nature of displaying the data, and the plurality of applications that may be desired by a telematics user, e.g., a navigation system, a web browser, email application, and any other suitable application, there must be a relatively simple scheme for navigating between applications. That is, unlike the disk operating system (DOS) where the user has to quit an application to get back to the DOS environment, it is desired to bring the system through the application. FIG. 1 illustrates a simplified schematic diagram of a windows environment. Here, display screen 10 illustrates two windowed applications, i.e., word processing application 12 and email application 14. As is generally known, when word processing application 12 is active, email application 14 has been notified that the email application has lost focus, and vice versa. However, in the resource limited environment of telematics or any other suitable resource limited networked device the amount of programming and the code size for this feature becomes burdensome.
In addition, for current systems, applications themselves are responsible for determining how and when drawing takes place. However, where applications do not have full control of the user interface which is true in the limited resource environment mentioned above, the applications may be responsible for sending data to the drawing code to update the view. These tasks tend to be burdensome on the application as the system is unable to write to the screen at a fast enough rate.
In view of the forgoing, there is a need for a system and method to alleviate the burden on the application for sending data to the drawing code directly when the application does not have full control of the user interface.